in Part II, chap, xxxi, of _Don Quixote_, where there is a passage
against those of the religious profession who "govern the houses
of princes," written with a bitterness most unusual in our author.
The privilege of publication is dated September 26th, and the _Tasa_
December 20,1604. The book itself, the First Part of _Don Quixote_ (it
was not so called in the first edition, of course), was printed by Juan
de la Cuesta during 1604, and published at Madrid in January, 1605.[10]
The impression was very carelessly made, and swarms with blunders,
typographical and otherwise, showing that it was not corrected or revised
by the author. The press-work, however, is quite equal in execution to
that of most books of that age.
[10] Those who are fond of dwelling on coincidences may find one
here of singular interest. The year during which _Don Quixote_ was
being printed was also the year in which, according to the best
authorities, Shakespeare was producing his perfected _Hamlet_. The
two noblest works of human wit, their subjects bearing a curious
affinity one to another, each the story of a mind disordered by the
burden of setting the world right, were thus born in the same year.
The reception which _Don Quixote_ met with on its first appearance was
cordial beyond all precedent, and such as must have convinced the author,
who was evidently doubtful of his new experiment, that here at last his
genius had found its true field of exercise. The persons of culture,
indeed, received the book coldly. The half-learned sneered at the title
as absurd and at the style as vulgar. Who was this _ingenio lego_--this
lay, unlearned wit--"a poor Latin-less author," which is what they said
of Shakespeare--outside of the _cultos_ proper, of no university
education--who had dared to parody the tastes of the higher circles?
The envy and malice of all his rivals--especially of those who found
themselves included in the satire--even the great Lope himself, the
phoenix of his age, then at the height of his glory--spoke out, with
open mouth, against the author. The chorus of dispraise was swelled by
all those, persons chiefly of high station, whose fashion of reading
had been ridiculed. A book, professing to be of entertainment, in which
knights and knightly exercises were made a jest of--in which peasants,
innkeepers, muleteers, and other vulgar people spoke their own language
and behaved after their own fashion--was a daring innovation, all the
more offensive because the laugh was directed at what was felt to be a
national infirmity. Who was the bold man who, being neither courtier
nor ecclesiastic, made sport for the world out of the weaknesses of
_caballeros_? An old soldier of Lepanto, indeed! Lepanto was a name
outworn. Spain was now in a new world. Crusades against the unbeliever,
even those more popular ones which combined the saving of souls with
the getting of gold, were long out of fashion. Lastly, the entire
ecclesiastical body--the formidable phalanx of the endowed, with their
patrons dependents, and dupes--though they were too dull to perceive
and too dense to feel the shafts aimed at obscurantism and superstition,
had something more than a suspicion that this book called _Don Quixote_
was a book to be discouraged.
In spite of the frowns and sneers of the quality, however, and the
ill-concealed disgust of the learned, _Don Quixote_ was received with
unbounded applause by the common people.[11] Those best critics in
every age and country, the honest readers, who were neither _bourgeois_
nor genteel, neither learned nor ignorant, welcomed the book with a
joyous enthusiasm, as a wholly new delight and source of entertainment.
Nothing like it had ever appeared before. It was an epoch-marking book,
if ever there was one.
[11] _Con general aplauso de las gentes_--he says in the Second
Part of _Don Quixote_, speaking through the mouth of the Duchess.
The legend, revived in the present age, that _Don Quixote_ hung
fire on the first publication, and that the author wrote
anonymously a tract called _El Buscapie_ (The Search-foot), in
order to explain his story and its object, rests only upon the
evidence of one Ruidiaz, and is contradicted by all the facts of
the case. No such aid was necessary to push the sale of the book,
whose purpose had been sufficiently explained by the author in
his preface. The so-called _Buscapie_, published in 1848 by
Adolfo de Castro, is an impudent forgery, which has imposed upon
no one. It is the composition of Señor de Castro himself, who is
a _farceur_, of some wit and more effrontery. Ticknor is even too
serious in the attention which he bestows on Señor de Castro and
his work, which an English publisher has thought worthy of a
translation.
The proud and happy author himself spoke of his success with a frank
complacency which, in any other man, would savor of vanity. Some seven
or eight editions of _Don Quixote_ are supposed to have been printed in
the first year, of which six are now extant--two of Madrid, two of
Lisbon, and two of Valencia.[12] The number of copies issued from the
press in one year was probably in excess of the number reached by any
book since the invention of printing.[13] But though all Spain talked
of _Don Quixote_ and read _Don Quixote_, and though the book brought
him much fame, some consolation, and a few good friends, it does not
appear to have helped to mend the fortunes of Cervantes in any material
degree. In accordance with the usual dispensation, the author derived
the least benefit from his success. Francisco Robles and Juan de la
Cuesta, doubtless, made a good thing of it; but to Miguel de Cervantes
there must have come but a small share of the profit. The laws of
copyright were, in that age, little regarded; and it may be questioned
whether, in a book published in Madrid, they could be enforced outside
of Castile. The pirates and the wreckers were busy upon _Don Quixote_
from its very earliest appearance; and its quick and plentiful
reproduction in all the chief cities, not only of Spain but of the
outside Spanish dominions, though highly flattering to the author,
could not have greatly helped to lighten his life of toil and penury.
[12] Señor Gayangos is of opinion that there were other editions
of 1605 which have wholly perished; one probably at Barcelona,
the press of which city was very active in that year; one at
Pamplona, and probably one at Saragossa, which were capitals of
old kingdoms. See also Señor Asensio's letter to the _Ateneo_,
No. 23, p. 296; and the Bibliography of _Don Quixote_ at the end
of this volume.
[13] The ordinary _obrada_, or impression, of a book at this
period, I am told by Señor Gayangos--and there can be no better
authority--was 250 copies. But in the case of a popular book like
_Don Quixote_ the impression would be larger--probably 500 copies.
Supposing 8 editions to have been issued in 1605, there would thus
have been printed 4,000 copies in the first year--a number
unprecedently large in an age when readers were few and books a
luxury.
Taking the object of _Don Quixote_ to be, what Cervantes declared
it--"the causing of the false and silly books of chivalries to be
abhorred by mankind"--no book was ever so successful. The doughtiest
knight of romance never achieved an adventure so stupendous as that which
Miguel de Cervantes undertook and accomplished. With his pen, keener than
the lance of Esplandian or Felixmarte, he slew the whole herd of puissant
cavaliers, of very valiant and accomplished lovers. Before him went down
the Florisandros and Florisels, the Lisuartes and Lepolemos, the
Primaleons and the Polindos, and the whole brood of the invincible.
Scarcely a single romance was printed, and not one was written, after the
date of the publication of _Don Quixote_.[14] Such a revolution in
taste was never accomplished by any single writer, in any age or country.
[14] The last book of the kind written before _Don Quixote_,
according to Clemencin, was _Policisne de Boecia_, published in
1602; but _La Toledana Discreta_, which is a romantic poem in
_ottava rima_, was published in 1604, and a few chap-books and
religious romances, of the slighter kind, afterward.
A few words only are here needed, in the discussion of that question
which has occupied so largely the ingenuity of writers, native and
foreign, as to what was the object of Cervantes in writing _Don Quixote_.
There are those who insist upon seeking in every work of humor or of wit
some meaning other and deeper than in the book appears, as though it were
impossible that an author should be disinterested or write merely out of
the fulness of his heart or pride in his work. With Cervantes' own
declaration, more than once repeated, of the purpose of his book the
critics will not be content. So good a book must have had a better reason
for being than Cervantes' dislike of the fantastic books of the later
chivalry. Who, then, was the man--the original of Don Quixote? Against
whom was the satire levelled? Of course nothing was then known to the
world outside of poor Don Rodrigo de Pacheco, the Argamasillan _hidalgo_.
Some great man Cervantes must have intended to ridicule. It was Charles
V, said some. It was his son Philip, cried others--ignoring the absurdity
of the Prudent one losing his wits through excessive reading of romances.
It was the Duke of Lerma--or the Duke of Osuna--or some other great man,
or Cervantes' wife's cousin, who opposed his marriage with Catalina. It
was Ignatius Loyola--our own countryman, the good John Bowle, suggested.
Surely these various theories are a little far-fetched and not a little
grotesque and absurd. What there is in either of the two Spanish monarchs
to liken him to the Knight of La Mancha it is difficult to see. Those who
have looked upon that wonderful equestrian picture of Titian's in the
Museo at Madrid, with its weird, weary, far-off expression, are
irresistibly led to think of Don Quixote; but the converse is by no means
so clear that on looking at Don Quixote we are tempted to think of that
most unromantic of monarchs, Carlos Quinto.[15] His son is still more
unlike his supposed portrait. As to the Duke of Lerma, they who can
believe, on the faith of the cock-and-bull stories told by the Abbé
Lenglet du Fresnoy and the Jesuit Rapin, that Cervantes satirized the
all-powerful minister in revenge for personal injuries suffered at
his hands, may be consigned to the same limbo with the believers in
the Bacon-Shakespeare. The theory about Loyola, first mooted by Bowle,
the English commentator, is of all, perhaps, not the least absurd. The
one shred by which it hangs is a passage in _Don Quixote_ where the
angry Biscayan, the adversary of Don Quixote, is made a native of
Azpeitia--this being the name of the obscure village where Loyola was
born.
[15] The question is reopened in the _España Moderna_ (1894), by
my good friend Asensio, who quotes from one of the histories of
Charles V how that as a youth he would draw his sword and lay about
him at the figures in the tapestry, and how once he was discovered
teasing a caged lion with a stick. This is slender material on
which to base the theory of Charles V being the original of Don
Quixote.
A sufficient answer to all these theories is that contained in the book
itself. Surely no one has read _Don Quixote_ with profit to himself who
has been unable to see that the hero is not one whom the author desired
to revile or to malign. Never was a satire like this, which leaves us
full of love and sympathy for the object. And why cannot we believe the
author when he avers that never did his humble pen stoop to satire? He
meant, of course, the satire of persons as distinguished from the
reprehension and the ridicule of human follies and general vices. As a
lampoon, _Don Quixote_ could hardly have endured to this day. The spirit
which has given it eternal life is love, and not hate.
To estimate the worth of the service performed by Cervantes--not in
abolishing romance, as has been absurdly said, still less in discrediting
chivalry, as with even a more perverse misconception of his purpose has
been suggested, but in purging books of fiction of their grossness and
their extravagance, and restoring romance to truth and to nature--we have
to consider the enormous influence exercised by this pernicious
literature over the minds of the people of Spain in the sixteenth
century.
The ceaseless wars with the Moors had trained the whole manhood of the
nation to soldiership. The trade of fighting was familiar to every man of
good birth, so that the word for "knight" (_caballero_) came to be
synonymous with that for "gentleman." The constant exercise in arms made
of chivalry, in Spain, a more solemn and serious calling than elsewhere.
As a native writer says, with equal point and spirit, there was developed
by the chronic war with the Moor a _caballerismo_--there is none but
a Spanish word for a quality purely indigenous--essentially distinct from
the gay, fantastic chivalry of the North. It extended to all classes of
the people. It was not confined to the aristocracy. "Every Spaniard was
a warrior, every warrior a noble, and every noble a knight of his
country."[16] They had not to go far to seek for adventures. They had the
Paynim at home: Mahound and Termagaunt were at their doors. There was a
constant supply at hand of men of the wrong faith and alien habits--the
delight in fighting whom was enhanced by the fact that they equally were
possessed of the chivalric fervor, and, though Moors and misbelievers,
gentlemen still and cavaliers.[17] The long and desperate struggle for
existence evolved the highest qualities of the race. And small wonder it
was that out of that fruitful soil which had grown the Cid and the
warriors of the heroic age, who should be rightly classed as prechivalric,
there sprung up that ranker produce, the knights-errant. Of these, the
seekers after adventure, the bohemians of the knightly order, Spain, as
her native historians boast, was the teeming mother. No other country in
that age, or in the previous one, could show the world such a scene as
that gravely enacted before King Juan II and his court, when eighty
knights ran a-tilt with each other, and incurred serious loss of limb and
permanent injury to their persons, in order that one of them might fulfil
a fantastic vow made to his mistress.[18]
[16] See the eloquent and judicious prologue to his _Romancero
General_ by Don Agustin Duran.
[17] "Caballeros granadinos,
Aunque Moros, hijos d'algo."
[18] See the account of the Paso Honroso, held at the instance of
Suero de Quiñones, before Juan II, in 1434, at the bridge of
Orbigo, near Leon, which is contained in Appendix D, vol. i, of my
translation of _Don Quixote_.
Knight-errantry, which was a caprice in France and in England, in Spain
was a calling. No other country could afford such a field for it, and to
no other society was it so well suited. The grave and wise Fernando de
Pulgar, the counsellor and chronicler of Ferdinand and Isabella, speaks
with complacency of the noblemen he knew who had gone into foreign
countries in search of adventures, "so as to gain honor for themselves,
and the fame of valiant and hardy knights for the gentlemen of
Castile"--boasting that there were more Spanish knights of the errant
sort than of any other nation.
The romance of chivalry was the natural growth of this fashion of
knight-errantry; and, like its parent, flourished nowhere so luxuriantly
as in Spain. _Amadis Of Gaul_ and _Belianis Of Greece_ are, in fact, as
much "racy of the soil" as _Don Quixote_ itself.
There were some simple or devout enough to take the romance for a gospel,
who believed in Amadis as much as in any other hero or saint. In the
_Arte de Galanteria_, written by Francisco de Portugal about the close of
the sixteenth century, it is mentioned that a Portuguese poet, Simon de
Silveira, once swore upon the Evangelists that he believed the whole of
_Amadis_ to be true history. This is capped by another story in the same
book of how a certain knight came home from hunting and found his wife
and daughters dissolved in tears. Asking them what was the matter--whether
any child or relation was dead--they said "No; but Amadis is dead!" They
had come to the 174th chapter of _Lisuarte of Greece_, where the old
Amadis finally dies.
The influence of the _Palmerins_ and of the Carlovingian romances, which
form a class by themselves, was scarcely inferior to that of _Amadis_.
_Palmerin of England_ himself, the patriarch of the family--that "Palm of
England," as Cervantes calls him--may be placed second to his rival in
merit. The difference in spirit is great between the two; for _Amadis_
really is, though in its present form of the fifteenth, of the fourteenth
century, when chivalry was in its early prime; and _Palmerin_ was not
written till the sixteenth century, when the true ideal of knighthood had
already been dimmed by the lust of gold-seeking and religious adventure.
Southey, perhaps, ranks _Palmerin_ too high in the literary scale by
placing it on a level with _Amadis_, and averring that he knew "no
romance and no epic in which suspense is so successfully kept up." Of
their successors, the long line of sons, grandsons and nephews, each more
valiant and puissant than the last, it must be said that they are as
scant of beauty as of grace. In order to keep up the interest of their
readers, the authors of the Primaleons and the Polindos--the Florisels
and the Florisandos--were compelled to put in wonders on an ascending
scale; to pile up adventure upon adventure; to make the dragons fiercer,
the giants huger, the fighting more terrible, and the slaughter more
bloody. The popular appetite, which craved for more and more excitement
with every successive stimulant, could only be fed by inventions so
monstrous that it is a wonder the stomach of the readers of romances of
chivalry did not reject the nauseous aliment. Yet there is no evidence
of any decline in the production of these books up to the date of the
appearance of _Don Quixote_.
It was to do battle with this brood of fabled monsters, against whom the
pulpit and the parliament had preached and legislated in vain, that
Cervantes took up his pen. The adventure was one reserved for his single
arm; and it was achieved with a completeness of success such as must have
astonished our hero himself, as we know by many signs that it disgusted
and irritated many of his literary rivals. The true nature of the service
performed, as well as Cervantes' motive in undertaking it, has been
greatly misrepresented. Nothing can be more certain than that his aim
in _Don Quixote_ was, primarily, to correct the prevailing false taste
in literature. What moral and social results followed were the necessary
consequences of the employment of his rare wit and humor on such a work.
There is no reason to believe that Cervantes, at first, had any more
serious intention than that which he avowed, namely, to give "a pastime
to melancholy souls"[19] in destroying "the authority and influence which
the books of chivalries have in the world and over the vulgar." That he
was not impelled to this work by any antipathy to knightly romances as
such--still less by any ambition to repress the spirit of chivalry, or to
purge the commonwealth of social and political abuses--is abundantly
proved by the whole tenor of his book, if not by the evidence of his
life. His own tastes strongly inclined him to books of romance. Perhaps
no one in that age had read more of those books, or was so deeply imbued
with their spirit.
[19] See the _Viaje del Parnaso_, chapter iv:
"Y he dado en _Don Quixote_ pasatiempo
Al pecho melancolico y mohino
En cualquiera sazon, en todo tiempo."
("And I am he in _Quixote_ who has given
A pastime for the melancholy soul
In every age, and all time and season.")
Why cannot we believe the author, when he thus plainly and candidly
avows his purpose?
The opinion of an acute Spanish writer, Don Vicente de Salva, on this
point we hold to be a very sensible one--"Cervantes did not intend to
satirize the substance and essence of books of chivalries, but only to
purge away their follies and impossibilities." What is _Don Quixote_
itself, it is shrewdly added, but a romance of chivalry, "which has
ruined the fortunes of its predecessors by being so immensely in advance
of them"?[20] What was Cervantes' own last book, as we shall presently
show, but in some kind a romance of chivalry--not free, alas! from some
of the very errors he had himself burlesqued? Nay, what was Cervantes'
own life but a romance of chivalry?
[20] See the essay of Salva's in Ochoa, _Apuntes para una
Biblioteca_, vol. ii, pp. 723-740. I know one great Spanish scholar
who has never forgiven Cervantes for destroying the books of
chivalries. But his anger is rather that of the bibliographer than
of the critic or patriot. He has the best collection of those evil
books in Europe.
That, after all, the overthrow of the books of chivalries was but a small
part of the good work which Cervantes performed in _Don Quixote_ is only
to say that, like all great writers, he "builded better than he knew."
The pen of the genius, as Heine says, is ever greater than the man
himself. Rejecting all the many subtle and ingenious theories as to what
was Cervantes' object in writing his book; that it was a crusade against
enthusiasm, as even Heine seems to suspect; that it was a missionary
tract, intended to destroy popery and throw down antichrist, as some,
even bearded men, have dared to suggest; that it was a programme of
advanced liberalism artfully veiled under a mask of levity, and, indeed,
the forerunner of that gospel of sentimental cosmopolitanism since
preached by other eminent persons supposed to resemble Cervantes in their
characters or Don Quixote in their careers--I hold that the author wrote
but out of the fulness of his own heart, giving us, by a happy impulse, a
fable in which are transparently figured his own character, his own
experiences, and his own sufferings. What is the key but this to the
mystery which makes this book, on a purely local subject of passing
interest, the book of humanity for all time--as popular out of Spain as
among Spaniards? A mere burlesque would have died with the books which it
killed. A satire survives only so long as the person or the thing
satirized is remembered. But _Don Quixote_ lives, and, by a miracle of
genius, keeps _Amadis_ and _Palmerin_ alive.
The invention is the most simple, as it is the most original, in
literature. From _Don Quixote_ dates an epoch in the art of fiction. For
once Cervantes was happy in his opportunity. And what is the secret of
his success? It is that this "child of his sterile, ill-cultured wit" is
no creature of pure fancy, but fashioned in the very likeness of its
parent, drawn out of his life, shaped after his pattern--an image of its
creator. How could Cervantes' romance fail of holding the field against
all the romances? It was his own life from which he drew--that life which
had been a true knight-errantry. The hero himself, the enthusiast, nursed
on visions of chivalry, who is ever mocked by fortune; the reviver of the
old knighthood, who is buffeted by clowns and made sport of by the baser
sort; who, in spite of the frequent blows, jeers, reverses, and indignities
he receives, never ceases to command our love and sympathy--who is he but
the man of Lepanto himself, whose life is a romance at least as various,
eventful, and arduous; as full of hardships, troubles, and sadness; as
prolific of surprising adventures and strange accidents, as the immortal
story he has written? This is the key to _Don Quixote_, which, unless we
use, we shall not reach to the heart of the mystery.
EARLIEST POSITIVE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA
A.D. 1606
LOUIS BECKE AND WALTER JEFFERY
As shown by the authors of the following account, there is no lack of
evidence that it was belief in a great southern land which led early
geographers and sailors to belief in the existence of the Australian
continent. Notwithstanding this, it is held by some students of the
subject to be doubtful whether the first navigators who reached the
shores of Australia set out with any expectation of discovering a
great land in the south.